… [I]f Americans saw a President in a man known more for his acting ability than his public policy chops in 1980, then Trump’s shot at being nominated by his party isn’t so far-fetched. The enabling assumption here is that Trump doesn’t push his luck and do something extraordinarily dumb.

Look at what happened during the 1970s: America departed Vietnam with a torn backside; Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist revolution, a state of affairs ostensibly made in the USA, was in the process of tearing another hole for America by using the embassy hostage crisis as lever; the US economy appeared to be in free-fall; plus the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan further raised the spectre of a threat to America’s superpower status. Americans saw all of these events, freaked the hell out and concluded their country’s best days were behind it — unless a hero came along to rescue them from their cultural pessimism.

And now let’s talk about that unfinished business: I never described to you what doing something extraordinarily dumb has to look like.